It wasn't surprising that storage powerhouse EMC got into the cloud storage business. But the company is now offering a VMware-based service to offer compute capacity in the cloud, a niche currently dominated by the EC2 platform from Amazon Web Services.

The Atmos Online Compute Service will provide instant access to virtual servers running in EMC's data centers. The cloud compute service is designed to work seamlessly with EMC's Atmos Online Storage Service, much like the relationship between EC2 and the Amazon S3 storage cloud. EMC published a Getting Started Guide late last month, and GigaOm reports that the Atmos compute service will use software from LineSider Technologies.

The details emerging this week confirm earlier reports from Gestalt IT, which reported details of the Atmos Online Compute offering back in August.